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There hasn’t been much to smile about when evaluating the recent jobs data in the U.S., with millions heading for the unemployment lines and the immediate future offering little hope.
Even the one positive glimmer that came from Friday’s nonfarm payrolls report just showed how bad things have gotten.
Average hourly earnings rose 3.1% in March from a year ago, a touch better than expected and seemingly a continuation of a general upward trend that started in November 2017. Earnings growth has stayed at 3% or better every month since August 2018.
However, the primary reason the number looked good was because so many low-wage numbers were laid off during the month, painting a skewed picture that did not reflect just how bad of a period it was for service workers in particular.

Of the 701,000 workers who lost their jobs during the month, 459,000 came from leisure and hospitality, mostly from bars and restaurants, according to the Labor Department. That made the wage bump mostly artificial and not representative of what workers are experiencing.
“That is a very misleading number. It’s caused by the sheer elimination of low-wage jobs,” said Dan Alpert, a Cornell Law School professor and developer of the Jobs Quality Index, which measures not just job creation but the proportion of high-paying versus low-paying hires and layoffs. “An increase in average hourly wages due to the fact that you’re losing people at the bottom is not a good indicator.”
The index had been showing a trend where lower-end jobs were disappearing faster. In March, the gauge indicated that more than 93% of the positions lost paid below the median weekly wage for all production and non-supervisor positions. Consequently, the wage numbers for March and likely subsequent months won’t be reliable gauges for the job market’s health.
In fact, a number of data points that economists, Wall Streeters and the public watch won’t paint a true picture of what’s happening.
“You’ve got a lot of strange data points in this report,” Alpert said. “This is the tip of the iceberg in terms of the overall loss of jobs.”